For My Homies of the Fall

College cross-country season has begun. As a competitive runner of over six years, I have a large part of my heart and 99% of the muscle in my lungs devoted to the running of hill repeats, windsprints, stride-outs, fartleks, tempo runs, intervals, and long runs, most of them through the hills and valleys of Upstate New York. No amount of career training recieved in college compared to the things I learned as a distance athlete: rural geography, methods of freshman abuse, puke timing, shit squeezing, tribal political structures, biophysical speed optimization, highway rest stop economics, commercial vehicle navigation, the sublimation of masculine violence, the list goes on and on.

None of it compares, of course, to winning a race with seagull shit on your thigh.

Technorati Tags: running college sports

Hurricane Katrina Relief

Make Red Cross donations here. And pray for New Orleans.

Hyperstition and The Northern Mystics

I'm feeling the need to conserve some of my blogging energy as of late, a time to inhale, draw in, and restrain. In the mean time, check out some interesting tangents and responses to my Coffee vs. Oil post over at Hyperstition (special thanks to Reza for the link). One such tangent which emerged, via Northanger, was this piece on C-Theory on some of the more metaphysical/mythical properties of the concept of North -- the Great White North, the Blank Spaces, the Void, the Vast Expanse of Featureless Tundra. The author, Sergei Medvedev, provides three exampls of this mysterious property, as opposed to our more culturally-loaded notions of East (sunrise, wisdom, new life), West (death, sunset, gold, opportunity), and South (summer, vibrant life, the Third World): Finland, Russia, and Canadian composer Glenn Gould. Of key interest here is Medvedev's tracing of the Russian ascetic movement in the 14th century, led by St.Sergius of Radonezh:

A son of wealthy parents, after their death he gave away his property and at the age of twenty-one retired from the world. He set out to live in the wild forest northeast of Moscow. His brother, who accompanied him at the beginning, could not bear the hardships of desert life and abandoned him. For a long period St.Sergius lived completely alone, surrounded by wild animals; the legend has it, that his only companion was a bear.

Given the spare, nirvana-esque quality of the Great White North, and given the growing indications of Global Warming, and the resultant new ice age it may foster, I am drawn to pose an odd question: is the Christian notion of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven at the End of Time to be interpreted climactically? Are Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, Peter Russell's White Hole in Time, Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero, etc. all just clever euphemisms for the glacierization of the world? That is, will we all become snow-mystics? (And if so, if human enlightenment is dependent upon an ascetic "plunge" into the Hoth-like wastes which blew open St. Sergius, what can we do to speed along the descent of this Frigid Overmind?)

My Response to Dallman and Tuff Ghost Re: Noise Music

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The Sound of Shit Hitting the Fan

From Daily Kos, an article worth reading in full:

The constant falling ratings of Bush combined with the start of what appears to be a vocal anti-Iraq War outcry (with talk about taking action in Congress) will in my view lead these Neocon sociopaths to their next step in an attempt to stifle all dissent in this country. And this is not a "conspiracy theory," this is our lives.

And if that doesn't completely freak you out, this one will. Nothing like a cold shower on a Monday morning eh? But don't panic, breathe....

New Essay on Writing Posted

For what it's worth: Chapter 5: The Problem of Obscurity" (a thinly-veiled meditation on death). Enjoy...

4th Dimensional Rocket Ships Going Up

Anyone that's been paying attention to the fringes of the alternative press lately might be forgiven for suspecting that something BIG is attempting to go down geopolitically. Skyrocketing gas prices, Bush on a 2001-style summer vacation, China and Russia running war games, escalating drama in the Middle East -- no one should be surprised if things get very different in this country in the near future. Sadly, Home From Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler may be prescient as usual in his new book "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century", as summarized here.

This, though, is no time to court dark visions nor panic and worry about biological survival. If you are reading this, you are fortunate enough to have something of an education and at least a smidgen of cultural/social/economic capital at your disposal, and at least a glimmer of metaphysical curiosity. Meaning: you are in some sort of position to help ease some of the suffering in people should the worst (an idea we need not extrapolate further upon at this time) occur.

What to do? First, establish a material platform, that is, put a small amount of energy into grounding yourself. Get some food. Second, develop a carrier, a means by which your presence in the noosphere may be felt by a larger number of people than in your local friend-cluster. Write a book, post some mp3s, slip stories into the word-of-mouth jetstream, whatever. Thirdly, get the juice. Sit calmly and abide, and observe, and bare witness. Practice sci-fi tonglen... transmute your dark visions into imagined/felt scenarios of human beings in positions of great tension and strife acting in a surprisingly worldcentric/compassionate manner. Rehearse miracles within the temple of You.

Each of these trajectories leads, of course, to the development of your rocket ship. Both "escape pod" (passive) and "stategic small vessel" (active), the rocket ship exists not in your backyard, nor on your roof but in your mind, in your chest, heart, and throat. As you meditate, perceive, or see through things, as you abide calmly and resist emotional explosions, as you see that all beings, from the biggest jock ass-holes in custom shirts talking on cell phones to the lowliest of reddish-brown roaches crushed to a slimey pulp in the bottom of a subway stairwell, are composed of the same spirit-matter nondual "stuff" that is not other than You, you are building this rocket ship.

And as you translate these insights into noospheric form, as you make art and writing and communication and music, you are building this rocket ship. And as you stand on this earth, walking slowly and attentively, picking up those who fall, being patient with those who bully, breathing in the suffering and breathing out the Lightness-of-Touch-HUMOR, you are building this rocket ship. But it is not a rocket ship of escape, far from it: it seeks to lift off, true, but it is also forever chained to this planet, and it will pull the planet with it.

Invisible, patient, powerful, high-tech: imagine it into existence with care, and get ready to fly when the time is appropriate....

[Relevant post from the archive: "Apolitical Times"]

Technorati Tags: Bush China Oil mysticism

Why Blogging is Better Than Face-to-Face Communication

There's a good chance I might drop this blog and reemerge somewhere else under an assumed name. As the content of this blog increasingly bleeds into my meatspace life (i.e. the other day when Vince announced the title of my dumpster post to the entire office), it becomes clear that I've had to stay my hand on numerous occasions in order to save social face. That is, I've had to pull my punches.

While one might think the retreat into anonymity would be a sure recipe for delusional ultra-subjectivity, the opposite may be the case. Becoming known for untrammeled, courageous posts which in no way glorify or earn benefit for the meatspace bodymind ego may allow a new level of authenticity to shine forth. K-punk, in (interestingly) a post on the death of Derrida (and fuck you Wilber heads if you're already thinking "Eeek! Mean green postmodernism alert! Read no further!"), declares that the success of blogging vindicates Derrida's "attack on phonocentrism" (read: his attack on the priveleging of speech over writing). Quote:

The default assumption is that it is only in face-to-face interaction that one encounters the truth of a person. In fact, the opposite is the case. Everday life is almost solely composed of a series of ritualized masquerades.... It's a blizzard of nonconscious signaling noise that typically invites mutual misunderstanding and sends people scurrying back to the dubious protection of their oed-I-pod burrows.

Blogging, however:

has the capacity to anticipatively decode subjectivized misunderstandings and pre-empt those that might otherwise occur.... So many of the hexes, blocks and defensive strategies that wall us into our protective Self-imposed prisons have already been disabled.

I would of course extend this to include virtually all online communication. As is the case with my circle of friends in the integral scene, most of us came together via the Integral Naked forum and other communities which acted as something of an "authenticity screen" before we each met in person. Email and blogging seem to facilitate and allow a free space which one's organic community / bullshit corporate job / home town / high school reunion seems to completely disallow.

Technorati Tags: Derrida blogging

Fundamentalist Math

(With apologies to Spy Magazine...)

Technorati Tags: Pat Robertson Hugo Chavez

Dallman's Music Heirarchy

You'd think having a baby and a broken leg would slow "the world's premier integral art theorist" down, but NO-- he's been hard at work slowly but surely building what I hope will be a genuine new intellectual scaffolding for the creation of art which breaks today's "been there, done that" creative malaise. Here's the latest in that quest, where Matthew interrogates Schopenhauer and Hegel and derives quite an interesting schema for the conception of music theory (see diagram at right). What I want to know is: what comes after timbre (if anything)? Might there be even subtler levels of rhythmic signication? And might our friend the stereogram have something to suggest on this matter?

What Is It About Dumpsters?

[Note: crude language to follow, apologies....]

Walking to work today, I passed by a row of dumpsters festering in the summer sun behind a row of upscale storefronts on North Broadway. Despite the clean, attractive facade of these stores -- a bagel shop, an artesian baker, a wine store, a Vic's -- the dumpsters in back were as rank and utilitarian as the worst slime-covered bin behind a 7/11 in Spanish Harlem. Which led me to this conclusion: dumpsters are society's assholes, absolutely crucial to the healthy functioning of our social body, but best kept hidden and out of site. And if you don't keep yours clean, it will stink.

How interesting, then, that there is a whole underground culture of dumpster-divers, picking through society's embarassing effluvia, many of them thriving by doing so. Zero-workers, Bey insurrectionists, postmodern foragers -- in social terms, they are essentially corporate anal fetishists, superorganism butt-fuckers, lovers of the interobjective rim-hole. And I don't mean this pejoratively. They are participants in the off-limits excursion, the inexcusable penetration, or as comedian Dave Attell calls it, "the forbidden hello".

The Garbage Liberation Front is probably the most adventurous of these dirt mechanics. Food, clothing, shelter, art supplies -- all are available to those who plug their noses, don long-sleeve clothing, and do backflips into cans of black plastic bags, and the GLF has staged entire puppet shows with the waste products less imaginative citizens had deemed beyond the pale of recycleability.

Dumpsters are like stoic old tulkus, avatars of the Old Ones, the lowest of the low who see humanity at its worst (the waste and the refuse and the bullshit we must hide from view), and in my opinion, are to be ritualistically worshipped as ancient repositories of esoteric wisdom and occluded information.

What are we to make, then, of these new moves towards zero waste in the hands of industry? Will the dumpster completely dissappear? Will the social body lose its rectums? Will trash pickers need to find a new orifice to plunge deep inside? Will the rats find sustenance in the sterile containers of expired boxes en route to their resurrection in cereal boxes and rolls of toilet paper? Time will only tell...

(Speaking of dumpsters, check out Radiohead's new blog, Dead Air Space. Just kiddin' boys.)

Technorati Tags: dumpster diving recycling

On the Stereoscopic Nature of Relationships

Check out my latest essay for Generation Sit, "Relationships as Stereoscopic Vision". Totally speculative of course, but hopefully it chews away some of the karma generated by the "Make War, Not Love" fiasco of a few months ago (even if I still stand by it more or less). As a visual complement to that piece, also check out this amazing piece of vision-art by Luke Brown. While it may tread the eerie waters of tradition-reeking anti-irony so deftly recognized by James Elkins in Alex Grey (see Matthew's recent post), Brown's holographic namaste still reveals there to be plenty of room to explore in the realms of raster.

My Obligatory Houellebecq Post

The mad frog's latest bout of literary fisting has been leaked early to the French press, as revealed by The Independent. I'm so excited I almost want to go ahead and learn to speak French just so I can read the damn thing this year rather than wait til 2008 for the translation. While some of us are still reeling from the mad revelations brought to light in his hagiography of Lovecraft -- Against the World, Against Life -- this new novel seems to be a continuation of the trend of combining controversial cultural developments (in this case, cloning) with graphic sex and that curiously French brand of anomie best charicatured by the scene in I Heart Huckabee's where Jason Schwartzman snogs the female deconstructionist in the mud. For those of you not willing to learn the most Romantic of the Romance tongues, console yourselves with repeated readings of To Stay Alive: a Method, still one of the most astonishing essays on what it means to be a poet I've ever come across.

Technorati Tags: Houellebecq poetry

LOL: East Coast, Fuck You

The little bastard is at it again, this time with a hilarious HST-wannabe send-up of the hip-hip-hipsters of NYC and elsewhere. Someday Marty and I will meet and I'll set the tiny terror straight (or vice-versa), but until then, Beckerman on the economics of Williamsburg:

For example, a four-person apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn--the veritable Mordor-esque Stronghold of Hipsterdom [LOL!--will cost each roommate at least a thousand dollars a month. With increased costs of living, transportation and entertainment (not to mention ludicrous taxes), you can easily be making $70,000/year in New York City and starve to death in the fucking gutters.

The Body without Organs (BwO)

The other day I started writing a story about a late 20-something woman who loses her body during the course of a walk through Manhattan (look to my soon-to-hopefully-launch fiction blog for more). Where one might conventionally interpret this as a sure calamity, it needn't be so. It sounds ridiculous, but all through my travels in the City I felt that the City itself was actively replacing my body parts with its own, turning me into what Deleuze and Guattari might call a "body without organs", wherein I was losing exclusive identification with this organistic bag of skin and beginning to conceive of myself more and more as the City itself, if not the Kosmos as a whole.

Perhaps this reflects what CCRU member Anna Greenspan indicated when she spoke of "the core of the earth [being] made of iron, and blood contains iron... [our goal is to] hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the Body-Without-Organs." In a long discussion on neurobiology, Spinoza, and addiction, mark k-punk makes the argument for the BwO as humanity's best hope for transcending the parasitic, self-destructive entities that our organism bodies (what Ken Wilber would call the "gross body") have become.

As I walked, my fresh air Boulder lungs suffered waves of inner-city smog invasion. My body rippled under the weight of many urban heat island temp-blasts and tidal waves of mechano-noise. The constant flux of people, faces, images, logos, buildings, historical relics: all catalyzed a queer sort of inner calm (when you're exposed to everything but can't hold on to anything, this becomes easier than it seems). Strange foods came in and out, money flowed forever outward, desires were confused, overloaded, and annulled, and my entire being became cohabitated to the subway maps I rode through and beyond.

Manhattan isn't so much a city as a cess-pool of mutation, a Precambrian filth-pond injected with electricity, triggering an explosive evolution (perhaps misidentified as "jaded pushy New Yorker-ness") in all those who run its gauntlets with their awareness fully exposed and turned outward. You can't help but let yourself be erased. Appropriately enough, Howard Bloom, a denizen of the city itself -- Brooklyn no less -- perhaps puts it best:

However a strong case can be made for the possibility that human biology has continued to evolve during the ten thousand years since Jericho's builders erected the first city walls. Genes change far more speedily than most evolutionary psychologists realize. Natural selection has had 400 generations to rework our bodies and our brains since the days when Catal Huyuk, Suberde, and Tepe Yahya joined Jericho's mesh of intercity trade. Four thousand years before the rise of the Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk, and Kish, Stone Age metropolises from Anatolia to the edges of India were already rich in challenges and opportunities. These urban traps and niches may well have been selectors forming much of what we are today. Homo urbanis has not only arrived, he has long since elbowed Homo tribalis far off to the side.

While he may not have realized the full extent of this evolutionary process-- indentification with the Nature/God/Cosmic body itself (the supreme BwO), ol' Bloomy may be on to something....

[Dear readers: shall I post this to GenSit? Any comments/contributions?]

Technorati Tags: Body-without-Organs Deleuze and Guattari Evolution

Update-- C.H.U.D.S. are real!!!

Whoah baby, now I have to revise everything I said about the subways.

NYC Mutations, Part 5: a Cybernetic Polytheism of Shifting Observations

Back in Boulder.... I arranged my time in Manhattan to be a discrete, self-contained envelope of experience, with its own notebook (a tiny leatherbound thing my brother bought in Peru), reading list (Rilke, local newsweeklies), and geographic boundary (the edges of the city proper). I was hoping for a certain density of information transfer, filtered through smog and sweat and recorded in the notebook. Various impressions and P.K. Dick-worthy speculations came and went, but none so capture what happens to the Manhattan imagination as the classic "reality-based community" statement made by a Bush aide last fall:

The aide said that guys like me [NYT-writer Ron Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Today I choose to interpret this beguiling bon mot as: there is no one way to experience, interpret, or perceive The City, in fact there isn't even one City at all. What appears to be a North/South-oriented strip of gridded streets and squarish-buildings is but a 3rd-person consensus illusion obscuring the shifting palimpsest-fractal that opens up before you the moment you step out of the subway. These, of course, taken in total, form the self-consciousness of a macro-scopic, nearly-sentient entity that exists above and beyond a physical and conceptual location. To turn the old phrase on its head: there are a million Cities in this naked (shivering, newborn) Story, and this is just one of them.

Ten moments where the MTA subway map lost its descriptive grip on the unfolding hologram I fell through for 6 days:

1) The HEAT. I called it the Sixth Borough, as it was something one needed to navigate through and around, as inconvient as having to bus it in from Upper Manhattan. Unlike the hot dry sun of Boulder, this was something weirdly worse: filtered a thousand times through mixed densities of pollution and vibration, wireless networking, clothing and skin pigmentation, bouncing in off the floorboards, soaking into the sidewalks and releasing itself onto your shoulders as you waited for a subway.

2) Anthropological novelty: besides your friends, co-workers, and local deli guy, if you ever see the same person twice in New York City, you might not be in New York City. That, or what I took as a sure sign of the City's immortality might have been an indiciation of something far creepier: duplicates and clones.

3) Subways as purgatory/bardo: though hellishly hot, I regarded the ubiquitous subway stations, where I literally spent half of my visit, as a weirdly timeless in-between zone which clipped and marked off each incarnational visit to a section of the City's surface. Each time you descend, you die, only to reemerge as a reformatted participant in a shifted time-space maquina. The subways don't even move, they rumble in place as the scenery is swithched above you.

4) The Age of Simultaneity: if one stops to contemplate, its obvious that the whole of human experience is virtually present in every single location. You've got people of every race wearing clothes in every style dancing under neon logos representing every brand/desire/corporation, heaps and books and bleatings of foreign muzaks, a thousand stories of a thousand more stories behind every suffering face. Time is ceasing to be irrelevant as wireless gadgets put everything in the palm of our hand or on the back of our wrist.

5) Darrell Hammond drunk at the Comedy Cellar: I actually felt sad for the ten-year SNL veteran as he stumbled about in his brand-new Yankees hat and sweatpants. I'd always thought of him as a responsible senior member of the cast, a self-denying craftsmen seemingly above the privations of the celebrity machine. But here he was, knuckled down under the weight of his humanity, lost in the intersection between the Sixth Borough and the Village, pining for another booze-run to Mexico as he slurred through his jokes. And Colin Quinn was even worse.

6) Being in the setting for Kids: one the most disturbing movies to come out of the 90s, Kids follows a pack of unhinged teens -- rapists and addicts all of them -- as they wander through downtown on the hottest day of the year. In Washington Square Park, where I beheld a xylophone player, a speed theatre troupe, and a couple sleeping hippies, Telly and Casper went nuts on some dude with their skateboards, a vicious beating. What's most interesting though is the disjuncture between the Park-as-shot and Park-as-seen, proving once again the Infinite Cities theorum.

7) A mojito bar in Brooklyn: Brazilian-themed and lovely, they put real coconuts in the drinks, and the paintings featured psychedelic linework and dead chickens. Too bad it will be a skyscraper soon.

8) The Sphere: now located in Battery Park, this public sculpture once stood at the feet of the Twin Towers. Now it rests, crumpled and mangled, a few blocks away from Wall Street, for whose sins it was killed.

9) Ris Paul Ric at the Knitting Factory: Q and Not U's lead singer made his return to the stage in the Factory's tiny basement venue, doing a lower-key version of the same danceable Q racket some of us love. The opening acts were even better though: two solo guitar-noise performers, one who screamed a lot and played Middle Eastern melodies in between amp-squalls, and a bearded gent who rocked the double delay pedals. Music is eating itself alive and churning out new weird forms in the basements of New York, a tempting sign of future Times Square concerts to come.

10) Coney Island: if you take the subway in, an absolute rupture forms with reference to the rest of The City. Standing on the pier, with a sufficient amount of haze, the rest of NYC dissappears, and Coney appears as though an isolate entity in the middle of the ocean, populated by a Noah-like cross-section fo ethnicities, riding depressing rollercoasters for all eternity as this Island circumnavigates the globe, leaving a trail of mustard, grime, and seagull shit wherever it goes.

Given what rich veins of territory this trip has seemed to open up, I'm toying with dropping this blog once again in pursuit of other things. Unless there's an outcry made by loyal readers in the comments, of course ;)

NYC Meditations, Part 4: Williamsburg... Hipster Oblivion or Trendy Apotheosis?

Written two nights ago after a night out in Brooklyn: I've been here for a grand total of 5 hours, and I only went to two bars, but I can honestly say I have never love/hated a place more. For three years I lived in Buffalo, NY, and my friends left town for Brooklyn at the rate of one every three and a half weeks. Ten years ago, this neighborhood was a ghetto, now local developers are planning a string of skyscrapers along the waterfront. As Brooklyn grew, Buffalo grew weaker and weaker. I never understood why.

What Buffalo had -- decrepit architecture, cheap art spaces, adventurous music combos -- Williamsburg has in spades, so much so it makes me sick to walk down Bedford. This is everything I've ever wanted, and I find it a total nightmare, wanting to run in retreat to the last things you'd expect: Walmart and parking lots, subdivisions and soccer fields, Big Boxes and greenspace. If the early 20th century belonged to The City, its latter half definitely fell to The Suburbs, whose ascendency (which grows ever more powerful as the Atlantas and the Denvers blot out the rural landscapes haloing them) is still going strong today. No more authentic poetry will come out of the urban fun-scape: decayed buildings and Coltrane festivals and ethnic neighborhoods are no longer cutting-edge. What needs to be engaged is the rest of America, the Red states in all their troubling gas-guzzling logo-alienated glory. Saxophonists in the office parks, slam poets in the Applebee's trees: when nouveau riche bohemians are moving to places named Sea Oak and Conifer Grove and Meadowbrook Gardens and starting media arts collectives and Brazilian copeira tournament bars in the cul-de-sacs of Nowhere, you'll know our work is done.

Having said the above, I must say I do plan to come here in the future, and perhaps look at an apartment or two before I move in earnest to a revolting duplex down the street from a Target and a Starbucks.

NYC Meditations, Part 3: Crowds at MoMA

The Sixth Borough, the occupying forces of Heat which held this city under its sweaty 95-degree thumb all weekend, dissippated last night with a water-logged T-storm bang, which yours truly was caught in the middle of (requiring me to hide out in the foyer of one of the downtown Federal Buildings). But before this, during the day, I hit up the newly-remodeled Museum of Modern Art to hang out with some friends from college: Klee, Kandinsky, Gorky, Pollock, Boccioni, Seurat, Cezanne, Bacon, and all the other great Modernists.

Unfortunately, Mr. Savvy Art Patron here attended said museum on a Sunday, meaning it was packed with tourists and hence, designed to enact the exact opposite state of mind I was hoping to achieve. As a former painter myself, I know that the great paintings are meditations, obsessive objects delicately balanced over long periods of time, only completed when the artist's mind is fully at peace with them. This "finished" state, stretched on pieces of canvas many square feet in size, is the quality that literally takes our breathe away when we see a great piece of art. Yet try realizing this when a French family of four is shoving their goddamn cameras in front of Van Gogh's Starry Night before they race off to bag and tag the next art trophy.

I honestly do not understand this aquisitive consumer culture sometimes. Note that the majority of tourists only take photos of the famous paintings, such as the aforementioned Van Gogh, or Dali's The Persistence of Memory, or Monet's infernal Water Lilies-- images these same people have seen thousands of times before in books, magazines, and on the internet. Why bother creating one more reproduction for yourself? Why not take the time to actually experience the original, get a sense for how the artist held his brush, stretched the canvas, and experienced the composition in its moment of creation? It seems our dear consumers were too busy managing children, making dinner plans, and looking out the window (I was aghast to see person after person brush by th Futurist Boccioni's Developmet of a Bottle in Space" in order to get a glimpse at some neighboring luxury penthouses) to let the experience of great art sink in. Hakim Bey said it best in his essay "Overcoming Tourism":

Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mind­scape, an abstraction("Nature», «Culture»), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.

It was with great irony then that I noticed how much the crowds thinned out as the gallery's path progressed through the Late Modernists (Rauschenberg, Warhol, Stella) into Conceptual Art (work so bland I can't recall a single name), as it was essentially consumer capitalism, and the incredible rates of social change it fomented, that led to these artistic dead ends in the first place. Thankfully, my faith in the future of art was restored by some of the work found in the New Acquisitions Gallery and with it, my faith in humanity in general.

Paul Chan's Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier, a 17-minute Flash movie displayed on a wide LCD screen and depicting the life cycle of a food/sex-crazed utopian commune from wide-eyed inspiration to White Male suppression, was clearly one of the most touching things I've seen in years (the long lines waiting to see it agreed with me), both poignant and pop-savvy at the same time. A second new fave was a rejected model for the new World Trade Center site, which consisted of five free-standing structures which also, paradoxically, all lean on each other. But by far the most encouraging new idea was The High Line, a plan to redevelop an abandoned elevated train line on the city's west side into a nature-friendly pedestrain walkway -- with fish ponds! -- and outdoor entertainment center. The collective cognitive load of so many honest simple world citizens -- struggling all day to understand the scribblings of Cy Twombly or the relevance of Fluxus -- came to a hopeful sigh of relief at the site of a room full of architectural renderings and models depicting what the world could look like should artist become re-engaged.

Soon after viewing The High Line I left, plunging headlong into the deep dark city streets, with clouds brewing overhead and a rock show on my horizon (more on that later perhaps).

NYC Meditations, Part 2: Psychogeography of the Endless Island

My stay in Manhattan has become something of a drift in the sense of the Situationist ""psychogeography", that is, "the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual." My brother knows exactly where he is going, whereas I do not, therefore every twist and turn leads to a new urban vista, both inside and out. I never knew this simple island of concrete and trees contained such a diverse ecosystem of neighborhoods, from the mundane mall vibe of South Street Seaport to the Kids skateboard beatdown setting at Washington Square Park to the unknown park systems of far northern Manhattan -- it's like a fractal exploding inward the deeper I explore, each pedestrian journey buffeted by the timeless netherworld of the subways, a dank hot purgatory of repeating (infra)structures which makes one wonder: have I been here my whole life?

NYC Meditations, Part 1: Lovecraft vs. Rilke

Written from a steaming apartment in North Manhattan with a headache and a plan.

A writer of the fantastic (and one of the greatest), [Lovecraft] pursued racism brutally to its most profound source: fear. His own life, in this regard, makes a valuable example. A provincial gentleman convinced of the superiority of his anglo-saxon origins, he never had anything more than a passing contempt for other races. His time in the rougher areas of New York was to change everything. These strange creatures became rivals, neighbours, enemies who were probably his superiors in terms of brute-force. Thus, in a progressive delirium of masochism and of terror, came the demand that they must be destroyed.

As I set out to make my long-awaited escape from the tofu-white confines of Boulder to the Big Apple, I fully expected the shock of the melting pot to push me into the same fear-based karate stance that knocked Lovecraft into paranoid states of horror-writing. Yet if I bear any hatred towards any element of The City, it's got to be this infernal humid HEAT, so heart-stoppingly ubiquitous I'm tempted to call it The Sixth Borough. It's like smog and slog have decided to have a footrace to see who becomes Key Human Oppressor for August 2005, and smog tripped and fell, giving slog the gold. Sweating, drooling, dripping, unbearable.

On the plane today I began reading a translation of Rilke's masterful Duino Elegies; if this guy's not a magico-tantric symbolist bad-ass, then I'm a committed Baptist with a cane made of Jesus' left femur. Rilke was constantly regarding external phenomena as symbols for internal realities, so much so that a "relaxing" nature walk was to him another challenge to redefine new external objects (a tree, a waterfall, squirrels in heat) as internal processes and patterns of intuition (this how I understand it at last).

In short, Rilke couldn't merely walk through a foreign landscape -- Manhattan, for instance -- and just see scenery, new experiences, people and places, exotic locales, interesting boutiques (to say nothing of predatory threats from other ethnicities, i.e. Lovecraft). He was cursed to process every location as a stage play of something going on, or potentially going on, within his own being. Rilke:

The Spanish landscape... pushed this tendency of mine to extremes; because there the external thing itself -- tower, mountain, bridge -- already possessed the unheard of, unsurpassable intensity of those inner equivalents by means of which it might have been represented. Everywhere appearance and vision came, as it were, together in the object, in every one of them a whole inner world was exhibited...

Pity poor Rilke had he lived to see the Manhattan landscape of the 21st century, especially today with its Heat, its glittering towers, SoHo, Tribeca, the MTA, the Village, Ground Zero and all the rest. 80 years ago, it drove Lovecraft to create long works of hate-ridden horror fiction: who knows what magnificent visions the more universalizing Rilke would have dreamt.

For Years I Decried New York City as The Eigth Ring of Hipster Hell

... and now I'm going there. Get ready biotches.

3, 2, 1... Shadow!

Today I participated in a video shoot meant to demonstrate a psychodynamic technique called The 3-2-1 Process, one of the core "modules" of Integral Institute's Integral Life Practice. Without getting into my theoretical issues/confusions with the whole thing, I can honestly say that--gasp!--I actually got something out of it. One factor, of course, was the skilled facilitation of the charismatic Zen teacher Diane Hamilton, who could make watching paint dry interesting. Secondly, 3-2-1 uses a lot of writing, which this idiot can't seem to get enough of.

Basically, 3-2-1 is used to get at those unconscious elements of our selves that we might be projecting onto others (I say might, because I'm not sure how valid the whole "projection" theory is in the first place) and to reclaim them as our own. The numbers refer to perspectives: 3rd, 2nd, and 1st. The best way to figure out where your shadows may lie is to consider the types of people who bug you. For me, it's happy rich people.

First, you write about one of these people as an object, as "he" or a "she". Next, you enter into a fake dialogue with them (on the written page), telling them what you think of them ("fuck off and die you piece of shit!") and beginning to embody their own perspective. The problem here, of course, is that whatever voice you give them will also be a projection (to really do this right, an actual conversation with the real person would be necessary).

Thirdly, you now write as though you are them, speaking from their 1st person perspective. Ideally, some form of compassion should arise. At this point, what you are projecting onto the person becomes clear. For me, it's obvious I feel guilty for being somewhat privileged myself, and can't stand the burden that said privilege entails. But at least I blog.

Goddamn It I Love Indie Rock! (David Berman and Ris Paul Ric)

For Tuff Ghost, Luther, and LL Cool Jase:
The rest of my life may be in continual, vicious-sun-beating-down upheaval, but good music will never let me down. Two great things to emerge today: Pitchfork posts a long-awaited interview -- with financial advice! -- with Silver Jews frontman David Berman (who also happens to be one of only two poets today I actually enjoy reading, the other being John Dolan of eXile.ru). When asked why the Jews never perform live, Berman offered this priceless gem:

I believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians. If you are making an argument with history you don't waste your energy and brain cells on sales, publicity, relentless travel, and other adjoining tasks. The less my body moves, the more energy my brain has to write.

Awesome. Also discovered today: former Q and Not U member Chris Richards is now touring his solo act under the name Ris Paul Ric. Interview here, two amazing mp3s here. I always thought Q and Not U specialized in a sort of abstract urgency, like the way a good Kandinsky makes me want to go out and take on the world.

Lastly, TG bounces the indie meme back with a sweet review of the new Sleater-Kinney, featuring Paglia quotes galore. It all keeps convincing me that: art may be a panacea, but its a damn good one.

Technorati Tags: indie rock Silver Jews indie rock Q and Not U Ris Paul Ric

A Manifesto, a Rant, and a New Chapter on Writing

The first version of the Boulder A(nti)pathy Cluster Manifesto (PDF download), my wannabe Houellebecq tirade, has finally been completed. Unfortunately, in true salaTHRUStra form, I no longer stand by a single word of it (I wrote it two weeks ago), but the prairie dogs will be pleased. Also, I got a wild hare up my ass and decided to post to my old blog Generation Sit for a change, in a piece of vague filth entitled Towards a Transcendental Specificity. To redeem this gaffe, I've completed a fourth chapter for the blog book on writing, "Conjuration on a Rainy Day", which discusses magick, mediocrity, and naval flotillas. Enjoy....

Technorati Tags: Houellebecq prairie dogs conjuration

Obsession: Death From Above 1979

Anyone who's read the coffee chapter of my book already knows what this band is capable of. Clearly one of the more inspired things I've written in a while (not as difficult task as it may seem given the drivel I pump out week after week on this blog), I can honestly say that not a single word of it was written by me, but by the catalytic reaction of the dark brew itself mixing in my mind with repeated listens to this band, Death From Above 1979.

The comparisons drawn by Pitchfork of DFA79 to their labelmates on VICE records, A.R.E. Weapons, are certainly apt. DFA79 play the sort of midnight funk-laden noise/rock that obliterates the thin divide between sex and death, and they do it with but two members to boot. Like a fine wine made of gasoline, cracking the bottle of their 2004 LP You're a Woman, I'm a Man conjures untold visions of dirt-chucking rockers of the past, from the deep Southwestern bass-metal of Kyuss to Thurston Moore's solo album to Lightning Bolt, Harry Pussy, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and, why the fuck not, Janis Joplin.

Like filling your mouth with whiskey and spitting it in the air, not showering for three weeks straight, letting mold grow in your forty bottles as you draw tits on your TV screen with a Sharpie, eating ramen and climbing a tree to puke cheap carcino-noodles on a sleeping pile of vampire bats, or getting your fourth straight enema at the foot of an afterburning ramjet, DFA79 launch uninspected ICBM's into the narcosphere of radical low-chakra consciousness, burning through octopus dens and magma men on their way down, down, down to the bottom of Love.

Indeed, the duo from Toronto have that rock jouissance in spades, but the album title bespeaks a darker philosophy burbling somewhere beneath the surface. We might think first of FuckingMachines.com, yet the title isn't so much a monologue made by a robot, but an acknowledgement that, yes, humans (men at least) have been machines all along, slaves to the inescable programming of their loins, incapable of a single original thought nor action untainted by the stench of, heavens to betsy, SEX and DEATH.

But at least they have mustaches.

Technorati Tags: Death From Above 1979 Vice Magazine Indie Rock

Lesbians, Karaoke, and Me

Last night I accompanied my newly-single lesbian neighbor to The Yard, Boulder's only gay bar, for Ladies Night. It also happened to be karaoke night, and my neighbor and I won the crowd over with a lunatic rendition of Young MC's "Bust a Move", a.k.a. the Soundtrack to Paul's Seventh Grade Torment. It was so good the owner of the bar bought us a round of drinks, and a couple shots of Jager later, the lunacy continued, with me -- the straight guy involved in a long-distance relationship -- jaunting and bouncing in a sea of short-haired revelers.

Now, without trying to sound like a voyeuristic hick, I will say I find the GLBT community, well, fascinating. The same-sex couple's profound rejection of reproductive futurism and premodern "moral values" in the name of embracing one's more authentic self is radical encouragement to all individuals wrestling with society's stifling norms. But the lesbian's rejection of me is even more interesting (not that I'm Jude Law or anything) in that, in surrounded by sweating females I bear only a biological compatability with, I'm plunged into a smooth space which, paradoxically, requires a deep embracing of interiors. That is, I am in an almost plastic/sterile environment which prohibits all physical penetration (which, in a heterosexual context, would be devoted to nothing but penetration), yet behind each grimacing-n-grooving face, I know there lies a more authentic self that has wrestled with deep issues of its own identity, a self which has cut through the plastic veneer of conventional society.

In other words: I can never be inside those whose insides can be seen by everyone. Or maybe I had too much beer.

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Site Updates

The Bright Eyes post has been revised, as it is the number one search string bringing people to this site. Also, and I normally don't talk about my day job on this blog, the Integral Life Practice coming soon page has just been launched, design by yours truly. Thirdly, starting this Friday I will be one of the guest bloggers on Klintron's Technoccult, a highly-recommended read for all of you esoterists. This will coincide with my trip to NYC next week, so look the fuck out Big Apple!

Song: Rainy Day in Boulder (verse 1)

Written last night in honor of the more hospitable, Northeasterner-friendly weather we're currently enjoying...

It's a rainy day in Boulder,
and we don't know what to do
The rocks are wet, the trails are dead
There's no more hippie food

It's a humid day in Boulder
and everyone is lost
The yoga mats are soaking wet
The tofu's filled with moss

But the prairie dogs are digging holes
in the alleys in the shade
The humans gave them lemons
Now they're plotting lemonade

'Cuz we don't belong in Boulder
It's too pretty, big, and bright
The scenery we're buying up
Won't go down sans a fight.

Technorati Tags: rain Boulder

You Are Coffee's Pawn

I don't mind saying that this is one of the most brilliant things I've written in a while. Too bad the espresso did all the work.

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Everyone Has a Comment!

Mr. Tech Wiz here finally figured out how to allow comments from anyone, not just Blogger users. That means you don't have to start your own lame-ass single post blog just to drop me a line -- sweet! If you need me, I'll be reading the new k-punk essay on The Cure, and getting ready for Kismet's party.

A Killer Town to Party In

In response to the Mardi Gras post, Mike asks me what world city might be the equivalent to Beijing in the 1920s, "a cultural center located in a location of intense uncertainty due to the war that was going on and the black-market human extravaganza." Mike then posits Moscow (don't think I haven't considered it, but we're about a decade late buddy) and Baghdad (if one could get around the strictures of Islam) as likely candidates. Given that I've been to a grand total of one foreign nation (Canada, which hardly counts, sorry Eric!), I hardly feel qualified to answer this, but what the hell: my vote is London. And yours?

Technorati Tags: London party

Happy Birthday Dan / Today We Are Busy

Dan the (w)hole celebrates a birthday today, please drop by and wish him well. Blogging will slow down this week due to the surmounting deadlines precipitating my summer vacation. Or I might just flip out and start a second book site.

For Only the Most Obsessive Readers...

Against my better judgement, I have started something of a book, the rough development of which will take place on a separate blog site. Several of you have complained about the absurd pace at which the BAC has evolved, therefore I've decided to offload one of my more coherent thought-trains onto a separate track. Full steam ahead.